I'm an expert in business growth and overcoming organizational obstacles to success and a public speaker at conferences and management meetings on how to grow your organization. I'm a workshop leader for companies wanting to find their next growth engine, an author of "Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition" (Financial Times Press), a contributing editor for "International Journal of Innovation Science" and a leadership columnist for CIOMagazine and ComputerWorld. I am a former head of business development for Pepsico and Dupont, consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and am currently Managing Partner for Spark Partners. Harvard MBA. Hail from Chicago.

Why was this a big deal? Because, in these few words, Ms. Mayer pointed out that Research In Motion is no longer relevant. The company may have created the smartphone market, but now its products are so irrelevant that it isn’t even considered a market participant.

Ouch. But, more importantly, this drove home that no matter how good RIM thinks Blackberry 10 may be, nobody cares. And when nobody cares, nobody buys. And if you weren’t convinced RIM was headed for lousy returns and bankruptcy before, you certainly should be now.

But wait, this is certainly a good bit of the pot being derogatory toward the kettle. Because, other than the highly personalized news about Yahoo’s new CEO, very few people care about Yahoo these days as well. After being thoroughly trounced in ad placement and search by Google, it is wholly unclear how Yahoo will create its own relevancy. Someday soon it is likely a major advertiser may say “When placing our major internet ad program we are focused on the split between Google and Facebook,” demonstrating that nobody really cares about Yahoo anymore, either.

And how long will Yahoo survive?

The slip into irrelevancy is the inflection point into failure. Very few companies ever return. Once you are no longer relevant, customers quickly stop paying attention to practically anything you do. Even if you were once great, it doesn’t take long before the slide into no-growth, cost cutting and lousy financial performance happens.

Consider:

Garmin once led the market for navigation devices. Now practically everyone uses their mobile phone for navigation. The big story is Apple’s blunder with maps, while Google dominates the marketplace. You probably even forgot Garmin exists.

Sears was once America’s premier, #1 retailer. The place where everyone shopped for brands like Craftsman, DieHard and Kenmore. But when did you last go into a Sears? Or even consider going into one? Do you even know where one is located?

Kodak invented amateur photography. But when that market went digital nobody cared about film any more. Now Kodak is in bankruptcy. Do you care?

Motorola Mobility Razr phones dominated the last wave of traditional cell phones. As sales plummeted they flirted with bankruptcy, until Motorola split into 2 pieces and the money losing phone business became Google – and nobody even noticed.

When was the last time you thought about “building your body 12 ways” with Wonder bread? Right. Nobody else did either. Now Hostess is liquidating.

Being relevant is incredibly important, because markets shift quickly today. As they shift, either you are part of the trend going forward – or you are part of the “who cares” past. If you are the former, you are focused on new products that customers want to evaluate. If you are the latter, you can disappear a whole lot faster than anyone expected as customers simply ignore you.

So now take a look at a few other easy-to-spot companies losing relevancy:

HP headlines are dominated by write offs of its investments in services and software, causing people to doubt the viability of its CEO, Meg Whitman. Who wants to buy products from a company that would spend billions on Palm, business services and Autonomy ERP software only to decide they overspent and can never make any money on those investments? Once a great market leader, HP is rapidly becoming a company nobody cares about; except for what appears to be a bloody train wreck in the making. In tech – lose customers and you have a short half-life.

Similarly Dell. A leader in supply chain management, what Dell product now excites you? As you think about the money you will spend this holiday, or in 2013, on tech products you’re thinking about mobile devices — and where is Dell?

Best Buy was the big winner when Circuit City went bankrupt. But Best Buy didn’t change, and now margins have cratered as people showroom Amazon while in their store to negotiate prices. How long can Best Buy survive when all TVs are the same, and price is all that matters? And you download all your music and movies?

Wal-Mart has built a huge on-line business. Did you know that? Do you care? Regardless of Wal-mart’s on-line efforts, the company is known for cheap looking stores with cheap merchandise and customers that can’t maintain credit cards. When you look at trends in retailing, is Wal-Mart ever the leader – in anything – anymore? If not, Wal-mart becomes a “default” store location when all you care about is price, and you can’t wait for an on-line delivery. Unless you decide to go to the even cheaper Dollar General or Aldi.

And, the best for last, isMicrosoft.

Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft phone sales quadrupled! Only, at 4 million units last quarter that is about 10% of Apple or Android. Truth is, despite 3 years of development, a huge amount of pre-release PR and ad spending, nobody much cares about Win8, Surface or new Microsoft-based mobile phones. People want an iPhone or Samsung product.

After its “lost decade” when Microsoft simply missed every major technology shift, people now don’t really care about Microsoft. Yes, it has a few stores – but they are dwarfed in number and customers by the Apple stores. Yes, the shifting tiles and touch screen PCs are new – but nobody real talks about them; other than to say they take a lot of new training. When it comes to “game changers” that are pushing trends, nobody is putting Microsoft in that category.

So the bad news about a $6 billion write-down of aQuantive adds to the sense of “the gang that can’t shoot straight” after the string of failures like Zune, Vista and early Microsoft phones and tablets. Not to mention the lack of interest in Skype, while Internet Explorer falls to #2 in browser market share behind Chrome.

As investors we often hear about companies that were once great brands, but selling at low multiples, and therefore “value plays.” But the truth is these are death traps that wipe out returns. Why? These companies have lost relevancy, and that puts them one short step from failure.

As company managers, where are you investing? Are you struggling to be relevant as other competitors – maybe “fringe” companies that use “voodoo solutions” you don’t consider “enterprise ready” or understand – are obtaining a lot more interest and media excitement? You can work all you want to defend & extend your past glory, but as markets shift it is amazingly easy to lose relevancy. And it’s a very, very tough job to play catch- up.

Just look at the money being spent trying at RIM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Yahoo…………

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Mayer is a fool, Yahoo has now become the best short position in the market today. the irony in her statement about BlackBerry is that when the BB 10 is launched, her employees are going to be begging for one! What is wrong with that broads head?

Yet another in a long list of would be thinkers who believe the world revolves around the one or two tech choices they ever make.

It is interesting you fail to point out that currently Microsoft is making more money from Android than Google is! That is right MSFT gets paid whenever an android phone sells. I notice too the the writers failes to note that MSFT has a track record of entering new markets and winning over the long haul.

Xbox took years, but today it is the dominate player and is poised for explosive growth. SQL server started as a toy that was derided and laughed by the “smart money” and today it is a world class multibillion dollar product. Exchange is a defacto standard, it grew in the face of huge competition and over time won out.

Microsoft has absolutely thrived in the Enterprise sector, but they were supposed to fail! Many of the bloggers writing these stories don’t even seem know how Microsoft went from zero to hero in enterprise over the last ten years, they are blinded by the shiny screen in their palm and fail to see past it. Ten years ago commentator after commentator declared Microsoft dead in the corporate space, they said it was not in Microsoft’s DNA to compete with Oracle IBM and others. Today that looks foolish.

Microsoft stumbled like a fool in the consumer space, but they are back and the full weight of Microsoft is finally being applied, combining all of its assets to leverage into rich markets. Nokia, HTC, Surface are just the beginnings.

Today Microsoft will sell more than a million copies of windows 8. Yes just today, and in fact every day Microsoft sells over a million copies of Windows, but that is still less than one quarter of Microsoft revs per day. Yep most money comes from outside of windows.

Irrelevancy ? I think not, Microsoft is not only relevant they are growing into markets like never before.

The writer dismisses Microsoft’s purchase of Skype out of hand, and clearly does not understand the global market. The very idea that nobody cares about Skype or they are not interested is just trash talk. Skype is a global brand Microsoft has completely rewritten the code base already and made Skype into a scalable durable software platform that is growing and profitable. In fact hundreds of millions of Android users have downloaded the latest version and are delighted to be using it. Perhaps the writer also failed to understand that relationship between Microsoft owning Skype and Microsoft finally striking good deals with carriers to get Windows8 off the ground.

But to be frank, I don’t expect much from bloggers these days, most just repeat what they saw on another site, reword it a little and hope to make a little money….

I should also point out, Adam has hated Ballmer as CEO of MSFT and will use any platform he can find to declare Microsoft dead. So his bias is well established at this point, as such many serious investors simply have to discount his opinion’s relating to MSFT .

Thanks for commenting oddman. This article simply points out that Microsoft was once the #1 company in techville – certainly #1 in downsized computing – but lost its position as the market leader. Why? Because they spent too much time focused on what worked in the past, and not enough time trying to figure out what the company needed to do to be #1 in the future!

I wish I could be more optimistic about Skype. But truth is that Google has better technology already, and with a little effort can put a better product out than Skype. But even if we ignore technology advantages – what has Microsoft done to make Skype a platform for building a powerful future for Microsoft customers? OK, 1, 2, 3…. I’m serious. What has Microsoft done to make Skype something that keeps people from switching to mobile platforms like Android or iOS that are easier to use and at least as good?

Microsoft keeps coming back to “we own the enterprise.” But that simply is not true. Once it was. But now IT leaders have to address the fast pace with which they must move to the cloud, and provide access to devices users LOVE. Whether they are better or not has become immaterial – people are choosing their devices and IT leaders must provide access to what people will use. The days when IT leaders could dictate behavior, software and devices is long gone.

I agree with you that xBox and Kinect are GREAT products. But that is NOT where Microsoft is investing its development and marketing resources. Oh, but that they would! A great future is there if the leadership can just find its way to move forward!!

Hi oddman. I don’t have a bias. I’ve just been very clear that Steve Ballmer is, without any doubt, the worst CEO of any publicly traded major corporation in America. He has singlehandedly destroyed one of the greatest monopolistic franchises in modern times. Because of the horrendous delays in Microsoft investments into mobile, and the over-investment into defending the Windows and Office franchises, Mr. Ballmer has not only seriously damaged the investors, suppliers and employees of Microsoft but all of those in the ecosystem built to continue the Windows franchise – such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and others. This isn’t a bias, it is simply pointing out that Microsoft has squandered a market dominance rarely seen in business – and investors (and employees) should revolt.

Meanwhile, all those IT personnel in corporations that committed themselves to Microsoft years ago are now at risk as the market shifts to new platforms, leaving them floundering without a decent solution other than wholesale IT change they are often untrained to implement.